The Next Wave of Boat People…?
So let’s hypothesise for a moment and say the American attack on Afghanistan goes exactly to plan and the Taliban are kicked out of power and replaced by some other regime more acceptable to the West.
For any such regime to maintain even a semblance of power in such a wild, lawless place as Afghanistan, it will have to be every bit as tough and ruthless as the Taliban – and will in all likelihood not treat kindly the many thousands of defeated ex-Taliban fighters in their midst.
So, it stands to reason that many of the ex-Taliban will be forced to leave the country or risk being hunted down. (And of course, be about as welcome in other Muslim countries as the Palestinian refugees were in 1948 and 1967.)
If this purely hypothetical situation were to come to pass, is there anyone out there who’d care to guess how many of these ‘caring, new age’ young (and not so young) men will find their way to Ashmore Reef and Christmas Island over the next few years in ships that magically sink the moment an RAN warship hoves into view?
And of course the multicultural lobby will tell us that such people will fit seamlessly into Australian society.